


Simple soldier boy

by AgapantoBlu



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Pennyworth (TV 2019), The Authority
Genre: Canonical Character Death, If you take one look at Alfred and REALLY think about what he lived through, Multi, PTSD, Post-War, Some minor characters from Pennyworth are mentioned, That goes for Martha and Thomas and Jason, That's just about it because everything else takes Canon and chucks it in the trash, war memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26990299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgapantoBlu/pseuds/AgapantoBlu
Summary: Conversations through the years, of a protective butler and his weird-ass friend.
Relationships: Alfred Pennyworth & Jenny Sparks, Alfred Pennyworth/Martha Wayne/Thomas Wayne
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> _I knew a simple soldier boy  
>  Who grinned at life in empty joy,  
> Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,  
> And whistled early with the lark._
> 
> "Suicide in the trenches" - S. Sassoon

**_London, September 21st, 1951_ **

The pub is half empty and almost quiet, the only sounds in the air being the vail attempts at an Irish song of the orchestra on stage and the groans from the drunkards fighting against their own bowels, and she’s staring at the smoke pooled up against the ceiling when the air shifts just so.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of electricity recognising matter, electrons meeting protons and singing in recognition. It’s something a bit similar to hearing the bark of a dog and knowing it’s your neighbour’s, or the steps of your mother on the pathway. A shiver that touches the whole room and focuses to her.

She keeps staring upward.

His steps are firm and quiet. Well, more so than usual, at least. He’d lost all of the bounce and the energy that she’d grown familiar with when he joined the army, and if she were in the habit of lying to herself she would say he’s been getting better in the past six years.

“I think,” she mutters, and she scowls when her voice sounds like a drawl to her own ears. “I think you’re not quiet enough to be a spy.”

“I think it’s not nearly late enough to be this hammered yet.”

She lets the hit come, though it doesn’t hurt as it should. She’s drunk, yes; she’s off the goddamn rails, and just waiting for the next train to come and blow her to pieces. So what? He’s not any  _ better _ . How dares he act like he can lecture her.

Her eyes must have closed at some point, because she discovers that she cannot see him without the herculean effort of pushing her eyelids up.

It takes a while, and her head lolls sideways on the backrest of her booth, but she does it and it really is annoying that all she’s met with is a buzzed head, an aquiline nose, brown eyes and disapproving thin lips.

“Your hair used to be so,—” she groans again, picking her brain like a pot of soup in which she’s determined to find a lentil,“—luscious.”

Plenty of her happiest memories involved braiding his hair and teaching him to read sitting on the rocks by the old lighthouse. It was always so clean, no matter how many hours he spent working at the docks, and he’d recite the poetries he’d memorised out loud, overacting every line.

“Christ, Jenny,” he sighs. There is so much exhaustion in his voice, barely a silver thread of worry for her to hang on, to believe that he might still feel something other than the pained screams in his head. “I’m cutting you off.”

He might certainly try.

With a bit of a struggle, she pulls herself to sit upright, or something resembling so, and she takes a deep breath. The second-hand smoke in the local tickles her brain but it’s not enough, so she fights with her jacket and chases it for its pockets.

She feels his hand on her ribcage and stills. A glint of lucidity makes her glare in the direction of his two floating heads. “I think you have me confused with that lady of yours from the acting company.”

Two head shakes, twice the disapproval. “Stop being stubborn.”

Deftly, his fingers pry the package from her jacket and pull out two cigarettes. One, he gives back to her; the other, he steals. Thief.

The idea of complaining crosses her mind, but she pushes it out because she knows he’d be prissy enough to take the light away from her if she does. Instead, she waits for him to have lit the match and his own smoke, before tilting forward for hers.

He takes an inhale that burns away half a stick.

“You’re not even savouring it. It’s a damn waste.”

“They’re cheap crap anyway,” he pushes back.

He’d been staunchly against smoking, before. Nowadays, he takes a drag whenever something is bothering him, and he holds the stick between index and middle so he can scratch at his forehead with his thumb. It seems to help him order his thoughts around, at least.

Someone at the counter has had one pint too many. Jenny watches the barman grab the man by the lapels and drag him to the door. Another Wednesday night — or Thursday early morning? — in dear old London.

“I got a job offer.”

She takes her time with the drag, makes sure to let the smoke burn her lungs to the thinnest capillaries. Maybe it will give her cancer. Good.

She blows out. “What kinda job?”

_ Is it a spy job? _ , she really means to ask. Her fist clenches at the mere thought. He’d never been meant to be a spy, never had the bones for it, never grew old enough to make the choice with cognition. His whole being was cut from a cloth of golden and silver and velvet, made for stages and auditoriums and—

Before this woman that he’s sleeping with —whose name she’s not allowed to know, apparently— talked him into substituting an actor with the flu, it had been a very long time since he’d been in one.

He shakes his head, takes another big drag. He’s jittery, which is utterly unusual of this post-war self of his. His knee bounces, he scratches his forehead again and lays his crossed arms on the table.

“Please, tell me it does not involve poker,” she offers, stretching her hand to drop ashes in the tray between them. “You couldn’t bluff a child like this, and you don’t have the money to be a terrible player.”

The chuckle bursts out of his lips, against his will if the way he brings a fist to his mouth immediately after means a thing. She takes the victory anyway, because it is a lot harder to make him laugh these days.

“No. No, it’s—” He cuts himself off. She hates it, because it doesn’t fit him. “It’s out of the country.”

This time, her vision clears up out of sheer shock. The adrenaline that sends her heart bumping out of rhythm floods her brain with thoughts. “What—,” is all she can say, “—in the bloody hell.”

“It’s nothing military or high-profile.” He speaks like a maniac, voice low but full of pathos, eyes trained on the table and his knee going so fast it makes the whole table vibrate. “A mix of body-guard and chauffeur and housekeeper. I don’t really know the details. Just that it’s big and the man wants someone who can shoot a gun and fight barehanded, if occasion arises.”

Jenny’s blood gets a bit colder. “This doesn’t have anything to do with  _ heinies _ , does it?”

“What?! No!” He looks up to her finally. There’s rage and indignation etched all over his face. “You think I’d cover up a nazi, just because they pay well? Screw you.”

“What else am I supposed to think?” she hisses. “Who else out of this country might want a Londoner who can shoot and fight for a housekeeper?”

He scoffs, but puts the cigarette to his lips again. When he takes his usual too-long inhale, he burns his fingertips and cusses.

He throws the stub in the ashtray. “I got a letter from my father a couple weeks ago. Didn’t say it outright, but I got the feeling he doesn’t have much time left, and the American family he’s been working for these past few decades will need someone of trust to take his position.” He bites his lower lip. “I asked some old friends to dig around and it turned out they put some serious money in the war. Most of it funnelled via legal ways into the medical departments of their army, but some took a more underhanded route.”

There’s little people around now. The barman has come back to the counter and is now pretending to wipe pints that Jenny knows barely ever saw some water. The more she stares at him, in a desperate attempt not to look at the man in front of her, the more she can feel the scrubbing of the towel on her skin rather than the glass. She’s dirty just as much, anyway.

“They’re Jews, Jenny,” he whispers, voice stripped, raw, cracking in the middle of the word. “The money... They bought passports, fake IDs, transatlantic tickets for whole families to escape. One of my contact says they’re still working on finding them jobs and—”

There’s a very specific look that haunts the eyes of those who have been in the trenches, and she’s grown too close to it.

Her friend, her little brother, doesn’t exist anymore, she understands that. He’s been on the frontline first, then in specialized training when an officer noticed him acting for his brothers in arms and mimicking accents with effortless ease, then finally undercover. He’d been in Italy, in Austria. He’d been in Dresden, only a few months before the last massacre.

Knowing is killing her, but seeing it killed him.

“You’re going,” she says, because it doesn’t matter that he has no idea what is being asked of him or that it’s going to be dangerous because people like that ought to have make powerful enemies with their generosity; nor it matters that he’d been cursing his father’s name since he were eleven and that nobody is going to remain to help his mother if he goes; that his sisters will cut him off like their did their father.

“I—” This time, the hesitance crumbles. He sighs. “Yes. Yes, I’m going.”

“To America.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a forty-four-day travel by ship.”

“Good thing I don’t get seasick.”

“Even if it’s your father who asked you?”

He scoffs. “I don’t care enough about him to refuse something that feels important to me.”

Arguing with him has never been a strong suit of hers, so Jenny doesn’t tell him that the war is over, that he’s bled enough, been hurt enough, that it’s time to stop and heal, that there’s a woman out there who might want him for a friend and an husband, with whom he could build a family down the years. She should, but she doesn’t.

Instead, she lets the particles of electricity buzz against her skin and she searches deep into her past. She brushes fingers with her past selves, draws on their powers to push herself against the boundaries of hers. The lights above them flicker.

She cannot  _ see _ the future, it was never part of her powers, but she can feel it, whether it’s inexorably happening or it’s put in danger by whatever mess humans bring over themselves. In this very moment, his certainty shapes the coming time and the future wields tight and stronger all the way to the zero of her countdown. It appears to her like the forging of a sword, with all the clarity that her friend’s choice is going to sharpen the steel into a blade.

She says, “Alfred,” and then falls quiet.

Blades never stay bloodless for long.

Alfred stares at her, a bit confused.

She finds herself thinking he’s so young, so much younger than her even if it doesn’t seem so. He had been a spry thirteen-year-old when they first met, and hanging around her enthralled by all her stories. She’d regretted telling them three years later, when he’d faked his papers to claim him two years older than he was. He always told her he enlisted because he believed in the cause and his mother and sisters could use the money, but she had never fully believed it. And she’d remembered what it was like when  _ she _ was fifteen, the beginning of hell.

The desire to protect him had been all projection, pure and undiluted, but she’d followed it anyway because she didn’t have anyone else.

Now, she might have stopped showing her age at twenty-seven, but is still, nonetheless, fifty-one. Alfred is twenty-three and still jumps at every firework, every whining car engine. He still cleans his gun regularly, and he drinks his tea spiked to keep the demons at bay.

She’s too fucking sober for this. Out of her jacket come the cigarettes again.

“Jenny,” he calls her quietly. “I want—”

“No, you don’t.” She’s not angry, but neither is she in the mood to hear lies dressed up as platitudes. “You don’t want my opinion and you don’t want my approval. You want a fresh start somewhere else because you can’t stand this bloody city anymore, and you want a fictitious form of clean slate to forget all that happened.” The match burns to life at her third attempt, and she breaths the smoke in so deep she almost rivals Alfred’s bad habit. “I’m not faulting you that. By all means, go.” She exhales. “America, uh?”

Alfred’s shoulders slump a bit, and Jenny realises he’s been tense all the time. “Somewhere in New Jersey. Gotham. I’m told it’s close to a bay on the Atlantic.”

“Uh uh. You’ll be trying out ocean air.”

“I’ve heard it’s good for stiff joints. You might want to try it.”

“Fuck off.”

He taps a finger on the table twice, thinking. “Will you be okay if I go?“

“You spent the past hour bothering me about it; you  _ are _ going.” A tilt of her head. “And you know I will be okay, Alfred.”

They never spoke much in detail about what she was, but Alfred had pretty much caught on immediately and then he’d spent years watching her remain unchanged. He’d seen her practice magic and manipulating reality and he’d jokingly named her a Fae. More details, he doesn’t need to know; there is an odd foreboding feeling in knowing exactly the date of one’s death, and she has no intention of pushing that countdown on his shoulders.

He’s going to be seventy-one, going on seventy-two, when she dies. With some luck, he’ll still be alive. No point in making him worry at such an age.

Alfred pins her with a judging stare. “I  _ did _ come to find you half fainted on a pub booth at barely eleven in the evening.”

“Screw you,  _ mom _ .”

It’s an easy thing, this bond between them. Jenny would set the world aflame for him, and he’s going to shape the next century, or help doing so. It checks out.

The band finishes another song. He claps politely as she watches him from behind the smoke coming from her lips.

She says, “don’t write to me.”

Alfred startles, but when he turns to her it’s clear he’s not really surprised. “I wouldn’t mind,” he still offers.

“I would.” She really would. Keeping people tethered to her has never been an option, because being a Century Child was a solitary path that brutally destroyed whoever got too close for too long. “When you leave, it’s goodbye.”

He stared at her, young and hurt and sad and yet so hopeful still and she ached, she ached all over with the desperate need to reach out and pull him close, hug him one last time, rip from the Fate’s hand the promise that he’ll be safe and alright wherever he goes. He did it instead, outstretched a hand over the table to gently touch her wrist. “If that is what you want.”

“It is.”

“I see.”

It’s long past midnight now. Jenny lifts an arm and gestures to the bartender for another pint. Alfred gestures to make it two. The band starts up another song, and the notes hit them both with familiarity and irony.

Alfred shakes his head. “Sounds like a sign.”

“Sounds like cats in a fight, to me,” she scoffs.  _ Sounds like one last hurrah, sounds like fareway my dear home. _

When their order comes, they hit their glasses together in a toast.

“To your travels, Mister Pennyworth,” she jokes.

He smiles, for once honestly. “To yours, Miss Sparks.”

The singer went on.  


_ I counted out his money  _

_ and it made a pretty penny,  _

_ I put it in me pocket  _

_ and brought it home to Jenny. _


	2. Chapter I

**_London, April 14th, 1958_ **

She’s  _ not _ drunk, when the call comes. A touch dipsy, perhaps. Slightly churned by cigarette smoke and war memories. Nothing even close to  _ drunk _ , though.

Which is why she resents the phone booth for slamming hard into her hip when she reaches for the receiver the barman’s passing over.

“ _ Bloody hell, _ ” a grave voice scraps from the other end of the line. “ _ Tell me you’re sober enough to understand me. _ ”

“If I can understand you, I’m  _ way too sober _ still.” With the hand, she flags Sid down for another pint. The man tries to glare as if they haven’t done this whole song and dance thousands of times again already, and eventually relents as per usual script. “Thought I told you not to contact me again.”

“ _ You told me not to write. I’m calling, and if I were to be pedantic I’d point out I’m calling my favorite pub. Not you. _ ”

“Oh, hey, ‘s great to know you’re still the same old insufferable wanker. Congratulations. I’m hanging up, now.” She isn’t, and he knows.

Alfred, always the gentleman, refuses to call her bluff. “ _ You sound cheery, for an old hag. _ ” 

Maybe not too much of a gentleman. “You sound rough for a thirty something man with a housekeeper job.” The truth of her words sneaks up on her as she’s speaking. 

Something is pinching at the back of her neck, a feeling of unease like looking at the reflection in a deforming mirror. It’s Alfred, of course it’s him, the low thrum of his voice, the smokey note in his  _ r _ ’s and the roundness of the  _ a _ ’s, that particular hiss on his  _ s _ ’s when he’s cursing. He structures sentences in such a way that betrays how many Shakespear plays he’d learnt by memory, and that alone would be hard enough to mimic.

But something is not the same. There’s a bit more of music in the flow of his talk, a tad more slurring of the words, meshing them together. American accent trying to sneak its way past, she would guess if she didn’t know the straunch haughtiness of Alfred’s resistance to assimilation. Most likely, a conscious effort at pretending to be settling in.

She wonders, so she asks. “Are the colonies treating you well?”

“ _ It’s been a minute since they stopped being colonies already, darling. _ ”

“There you are. A modern American citizen already, that’s what you are. Can you whistle the hymn already?”

“ _ Christ. More tactless than I remembered you. _ ”

“I told you I didn’t like ‘em.”

“ _ Can’t say I do, either. With a few exceptions, of course. _ ”

“Are these exceptions somewhere near your employers, at least?”

“ _ I’m not calling to complain about the job, Jenny. I like it. It’s good. _ ”

“Uh uh.” Look at her pint. It’s empty, only a few bubbles clinging to the glass, and there’s something not easily identified at the bottom. Ugh.

“ _ It really is. The Master is nice, if a bit idealistic. He’s on night shift at the hospital more often than not and when he comes home he’s drunk enough on insomnia that he starts trying to talk me into becoming a hippie. _ ”

Jenny snorts something ugly as she tilts the pint up to try and see the bottom in front of the lights. “You? A hippie?”

“ _ I’ve been reminding him of the reasons for which he employed me, but he seems to forget often. He recommended Kerouac’s works. _ ”

“Jesus, Alfie, what are you doing with people like-  _ Bollocks! _ ”

“ _ Jenny? Jenny, are you okay? _ ”

No, she’s not. Fucking gravity. Her face is full of beer and foam and whatever stuff was at the bottom of her pint. Fuck it.

She wipes it with her palm, cursing all the way along. It clings to her fingers even as it melts, feeling powdery and squishy at the same time. She frowns. 

“Yes, I’m fine, don’t worry.”

“ _ Are you sure? _ ”

“Uh uh, just, uh.” A spark of magic, just to make sure. “Can you give me a second, Alfred? I’ll call you back.”

“ _ Of course. _ ”

She makes sure the phone is properly hung up before turning to Sid and let the entirety of her incredulity soak in her voice. “Did you fucking put fucking arsenic in my fucking beer?” Sid gapes. “Oh, you dried-up pissed-stained sold-out ballsack.”

Her pint goes flying and finds its mark on Sid’s nose. Shards of glasses, drops of blood, the stink of cheap beer.  _ Christ _ , she’ll have to find a new pub.

She doesn’t bother with cleaning up the mess of whoever might have seen her, might describe her to the police. It’s not going to matter if by the time the pigs are done chasing their asses and tasting the booze as  _ proof _ of a crime she’ll be on the other side of the ocean.

America has to have some decent pubs, does it? God, she hopes.

Outside the pub, two streets down, there’s a phone booth. She doesn’t have many quarters, but a spark of electricity is enough to let the thing believe she’s bloody rich in pennies. The phone rings twice.

“ _ Let me guess, _ ” Alfred speaks in that tone, the one he developed just shy of thirteen by living with an absentee father, an alcoholic mother, two shrewed sisters and a mentor who - she’s honest enough to take her blame - needed a bit of handling rather than blind following. The I’m-pretending-to-guess-but-I-actually-know tone. “ _ Ran into a spot of trouble, didn’t you? _ ”

Jenny hums. “The beer was watered down.”

“ _ Atrocious. _ ”

“Indeed. I don’t think I’ll walk into that place ever again.”

“ _ What a terrible loss of income, for them. _ ”

“I was thinking about testing out the New World, but your bitchiness is driving me to Italy.”

“ _ You hate Italy. Too much sun, remember? _ ”

“There has to be a not-sunny spot somewhere in the whole bloody peninsula.”

“ _ You can certainly try your luck. _ ”

She rolls her eyes, and immediately regrets it when she spots a suspicious stain on the ceiling of the booth. Christ. A phone booth. These things are all glass and cheap plastic, for fuck’s sake. What deranged mental individual would want to strip in one?

She closes her eyes and forces herself not to think about it. “Call me paranoid, but I don’t think you called after seven years just to chat me up.” For a moment, he remains quiet. In the empty street, without the chaos of the pub to drown it out, she can hear the background noise on his end. A soft sound of water, and heavy steps. Once, a man yelling a blasphemy. “Are you at the docks?”

“ _ I was chasing a trail. _ ” Alfred on a mission is a different Alfred from her friend. That one is a cool motherfucker who could shoot your brains out and only react if blood stained his shirt. Compartmentalization, she thinks. A necessity of the war and a given of the spywork. That’s the man she’s talking with now, and this man is at the docks instead of his luxurious Manor serving tea to the Madam and Scotch to the Master. “ _ I might need your help. _ ”

Christ. He used the word  _ Master _ .  _ Master Wayne _ . For fuck’s sake.

“A trail of what?” she speaks, a touch too venomous. “Vanished silver spoons?”

“ _ Resurrected SS agents, as a matter of fact. If the topic is still of interest to you? _ ”

Jenny’s blood runs cold.

After the Nürnberg process, most nazists had been found guilty and taken care of. Little mercy to any of them, and good of it. But she’s not stupid and she’s been around the world ever since time itself, and she knows humans. She knows bullies are fundamentally cowards and she knows people are fundamentally just luxury goods. Most of them have a price they give themselves. A few years ago, she would have bet her own life on one single person not being up for sale in the whole of England, islands included; but that person left the continent now, and the whole place looks a tad bleaker every morning.

Flashes of lights. The whistle that follows the bombs. The bare room, stripped naked, with the soldiers and the chair. The ropes. The blindfold. The blood. Her rage thundering in her chest. His violent shivers reopening his wounds. Stink of death all around.

_ Fuck _ , the thought slips unbridled in her mind,  _ let him be safe.  _ “How sure are you.”

“ _ We had guests over two nights ago _ .” Voice easy, devoid of emotion, left Alfred looking like any of the veterans she sees at the bar counters, or the morgue. “ _ Potential investors for the Wayne Foundation Hospital. Master Wayne was very hopeful for the encounter. _ ”

_ Stop calling him that _ , she wants to yell. “That’s what you get for being optimistic these days.”

“ _ Believe me, I’m working on thwarting the attitude. _ ”

“You told them?”

“ _ No. No, I needed to be sure, first. I pulled some strings I still held and an informant met me here tonight. I called you straight after. _ ”

“Why?”

“ _ Because the asshole came to America in first class on a bloody cruise. I was a decorated officer with billionaires keeping their eyes on me, and I travelled economy. You want to know how fucking horrible that was? Because it fucking was. _ ”

His rage is understandable, but surprising somehow. She searches her chest for some trace of offense or anger, any hint that his straight to the point attitude might have hurt her feelings, but all she can find are shreds of achingly familiar worry patching themselves back together in a quilt of dark shades and raw texture. 

Economy is just fancy words for six-people cabins just by the engines, forty-four days of stifling air and deafening noise and people stacked so close together you could breathe each others’ piss. Alfred had been one of the lucky ones who knew America had a secure job waiting for him and a safe base in Jenny to return to if things somehow went sour, but that only meant he had a little better mind to face the struggle.

All of that, just to find himself serving dinner to the bastards who ripped his nails out in a cell five miles from Dusseldorf.

_ You didn’t deserve that. You so didn’t. Darling, I’m so sorry.  _

“Either they had enough money and they bought their freedom-,” she guesses, “-or they had powerful friends who bought it for them.”

Alfred speaks in seething whispers. “ _ Bloody money is still money, it seems. _ ”

_ Isn’t that the fucking truth. _ “What do you need me to do?”

“ _ I’m going to tell the Master and Madam what I found. See what they want to do about it. At the very least, this will stop the partnership, but I know them to be a tad too- _ ”

“-idealistic, you mentioned. Fuck. You think they’ll go to the police with this? The police let those shits into the country!”

“ _ I am very much aware of the fallacies of the American security system, dove. _ ”

Dove. Someone close by, listening in.

With effort, Jenny reeled herself in. “I’ll be at the docks tomorrow morning, by the phone booth you’re calling from. Watch your back, go home. If worse comes to worst, I’ll take care of it. You just focus on having an alibi ready if anyone ever thinks of looking into the daily routine of an ex-MI6.”

“ _ Catering Corps, you mean. That’s how I met the requisites to work for the Waynes. _ ”

“You always have an answer ready for everything, don’t you?”

“ _ By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. _ ”

“I will fuck you up with my bare hands, you snobbish bastard.” She hangs up. It’s frankly the only way to get the last word over Alfred.

Moving at the speed of light, she wouldn’t get out of that filthy booth fast enough. The air is chilly and downright wet and it takes her five efforts to get the match to stay on long enough to light her cigarette up. There’s a faint sound of sirens in the background, which means that  _ finally _ someone came up with a reasonable explanation as to why a woman would find her pint full of arsenic in a crowded pub. 

The reason for a woman to smash a pint on a man’s face is easy. Self defence, for the lady; hysteria, for the sirs.

Quiet, with brisk pace, she turns into an alley and starts walking. Just the time of the stick, she tells herself. 

Once it will run out, she’ll mingle with the current running in the cables above her. By tomorrow morning, she’ll be in America; by midday, she’ll have found out where the fuck Gotham is. By the evening, she has all intentions of making sure the bastards are dead and buried. A sudden business trip out of the country, perhaps; or an illness that forced them to run to Switzerland, wonderful clinics there.

From then, it will all be just finding out how to appease Alfred’s pricklishness.


	3. Chapter II

**_Gotham, October 31st, 1963_ **

Alfred Pennyworth had been an exuberant kid turned into a patient man by circumstances, experience and History. The transition left him with a quick tongue accompanied by posed manners and inscrutable eyes.  Martha Wayne, ever the gentle soul, describes his attitude as ‘surprising wit’; Thomas Wayne, after years of relentless comments, ‘a surprise punch to the guts’. Both seem exceedingly fond of him.

Alfred struggles not to get in over his head, sometimes.

In the whole of his life before his father’s fatidical letter found him half-dead and half-insane from the war, never he’d have imagined he’d found himself quite like this: quietly seething at the thought of an old lady in the vegetable aisle in Gotham’s biggest supermarket. The woman in question in that very afternoon wouldn’t stop picking every single orange on display, touching it briefly, testing the poor thing to the point of breaking, and then  _ putting it down  _ again.

_ Lord’s mercy _ , he’d thought, feeling his grip on reality loosening with every touched fruit,  _ why isn’t anyone putting a stop to this madness? _

The woman had eventually, in blissful ignorance, moved on to the zucchini and Alfred had been able to do his own shopping, rapidly and efficiently.

Now, Alfred closes his eyes. Counts to ten twice, for good measure, and then looks back down on the list in his hand. He knows it by memory, of course, and he knows he has everything he needs. In and out in twelve minutes, driven by the memory of all the silver still in need of polishing before tonight’s gala.

Now, scrubbing hard at a soup spoon, he spends the time dipping over and over in his hatred for an unknown hag, with no idea as to why this is bothering him so much. A leftover from his childhood, probably, when he’d been smelling of fish so often every vendor at the farmers market had eyed him with distrust whenever he walked closer to their stall. And that woman, instead-

He blinks.

Surprisingly, it is not a trick of his mind, but instead the service phone of the kitchen which is truly ringing. Thomas is at work, and Alfred made sure that he had his lunch with him, but Martha is in the garden patio enjoying her tea, so she wouldn’t be able to call. Who else?

He picks the phone up, “ _ Wayne Manor _ ” strict and concise, not fully friendly, and he only needs a syllable of the dry laughter on the other end to know.

Who else, indeed.

“ _ That’s such a pompous name, _ ” she offers, unasked. “ _ You know where it comes from? _ ”

“The house was built thirteen generations ago, by the Master’s ancestors,” he scoffs right back. “I believe it is only fair to give such a durable building the poor man’s name.”

“ _ And you know what happened to him? _ ”

“A tragic death,” Alfred recalls. “Fallen from his horse. Terrible accident.”

“ _ You sounded suspiciously insistent on the accidental part. _ ”

“His wife might have not been too pleased with him, at the moment of, but I am sure it is absolutely unrelated.”

“ _ Of course. _ ”

The amusement in her voice warms him up. They  _ had _ promised not to get in contact again, for real this time, but he has never been much pleased with the decision. He’s aware that he doesn’t know much of Jenny, and much less he could ask, but Jenny’s a part of his life the same way a sea limpet is part of the reef.

Stuck and relentless.

From the hum through the phone he can picture the way she’s arching a brow at him, lazy like a cat, vicious like a hyena.

Knife and cutlery forgotten, he lets the towel hang on his shoulder to massage his forehead. “I’m glad to hear from you again.”

“ _ I happened to be in Gotham this morning _ ,” she drops it like a bomb and his head swims with the far-too-familiar shell-shock, _ “I saw you through the supermarket window, contemplating cans of dried plums. Didn’t your Ma’ use to stuff you full of those things to get you to shit, when you were six? _ ”

He closes his eyes.  _ It was castor oil _ . “Always so crass, Jenny.”

She snorts. The sound is both more unnerving and still exceedingly familiar with the phone to play middleman. “ _ Posher by the day, Alfred. How’s life in the uptown? _ ”

Wayne Manor is not quite as uptown as the highest hill, compared to the rest of the city; and quite removed from the urban grounds, too. He chooses not to tell her that. “The Master and Madam are exquisite people, I believe I told you.”

“ _ Keep calling them that and I’ll never believe you. _ ”

In a way, Alfred can understand it. He fought for his freedom and tasted captivity enough that he himself had bucked at his father’s etiquette lessons on the titles and names. Got into a squabble with the man over it, as well. 

He’s not so deep in his denial that he won’t admit that a big chunk of his respect for the family comes from Thomas patching up his split lip, quietly asking, carefully listening to the barebones of his life, and finally very stiffly apologizing. His father’s employment had been a choice of an older generation of Waynes, and the new one seemed to take issue with corporal handling of  _ the help _ .

“It’s just for appearances,” he admits, in the lowest murmur he can muster.  _ Thomas is absolutely fine, Alfred, come on. How long have you worked for us and I’m still losing my voice over this? _ “Not for...daily matters.”

He can feel her eyes all over him, and she’s not even here. “ _ Mmh mmh _ .”

“Jenny,” he forces his mind away from the thoughts and of course he falls on the next most pressing issue. “I thought you said you were never coming to Gotham again.”

Deflection never impressed Jenny much, and her grunt says so, but Alfred hears the scraping sound of a match, so maybe she’ll let him off this time. “ _ Tonight is Halloween. _ ”

“I am aware of the incoming festivity, yes.” 

The masquerade party at the Manor should have been the most important event of the season, but apparently the Major will be holding his own event. Pompous ass, couldn’t even serve some decent tarts and passable wine, let alone sufficient service. Must he trade his soul to the devil himself, Alfred is going to make sure that the Wayne Gala tonight is so overwhelmingly  _ better _ the man will never dare such a discourtesy again.

“ _ And you know about the Jack O’Lantern story? _ ”

“It’s fairly common knowledge. Jenny, what’s the point of-”

“ _ Your Manor might be haunted. _ ”

The knife slips from his grip, he realises with a spot of shame. “I beg your pardon?”

“ _ Well, not the whole place. Just the rooms that were there originally, when the house was first built. Remember how I asked you if you knew what had happened to the Wayne who built the house? _ ”

“I’m going to hang up.”

“ _ I know you’re going to be hosting a party tonight, I know a magician who might have drunk a bit too much last full moon, and I’m calling you from the municipal land registry. Want to know when the grand salon was built? Or would rather guess? _ ”

Of all the things. Alfred pinches the bridge of his nose and considers, very briefly, resigning from the job. He’s thwarted quite the number of attempted assassinations, assaults and, or, kidnappings on the Waynes, and he’s fairly sure he’s not paid enough to deal with the supernatural as well.

“Alfred, darling, I fear the weather is getting too chilly for the patio. I think-oh, I’m sorry!”

He turns.

Martha’s face is morphed in an expression of childish glee. Clearly, she’s enthusiastic to see him taking a personal call, as she’s been on his case a lot about the sisters he’s been cut off from. She’s brought the tray of her tea inside herself, and Alfred offers her a scolding glare for the trouble, but she waves him away. “Take your time!” and her voice is cheery and loud enough that Jenny  _ has _ to have heard her.

Damnit. “Would you give me a second?”

“ _ Everything for the Ma’am, _ ” is the sarcastic response. Alfred elects to ignore it, and presses the receiver firmly to his chest to muffle the conversation.

“Madam, I could have-”

“Martha, Alfred!”

“ _ Miss  _ Martha _ , _ ” he compromises. “There was no need for you to trouble yourself.”

Again, she waves his complaints away. “It’s just a measly tray, Alfred, don’t be so strict.” Her smile seems to have gathered all the autumn sun rays from the garden, and brings them around to fill the rooms with pale gentle light. She takes a couple steps closer, just enough to meet Alfred’s personal space and stop at the edges as if waiting for permission. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Is it...?”

The hope in her pale blue eyes is undeniable and Alfred hates himself a bit for crushing it. “We seem to be having issues with one of the chandeliers in the salon for tonight.” He wonders at times which polished his skill in lying on the spot, whether theatre or spying. “I have a good friend of mine who will be able to swoop in before the guests arrive. I was just talking with her.”

“Oh. That’s- thank you, Alfred.” Martha smiles still, a bit softer and a bit kinder and a bit sadder, and she steps closer. Her hand lays carefully on his shoulder as if not to spook him, a small point of contact that burns him whole like a pyre. “What would we do without you?”

Somehow, he conjures a smile in return. “Hire another butler, I suppose.”

“None who could compare, I am sure,” she slaps playfully at his elbow. “I should go get ready for tonight. Could you bring me my mask when you’re done with the chandelier?”

“Of course.”

“You’re precious, Alfred,” she says, as if meant more than what words expressed, as if to appease his loneliness and the distance with his family. He wonders, as he watches her leave, idly, if she can conceive the brokenness of the bonds he’d held in England, how little they matter to him truly; if she has any idea of the vastity of what he’d do for her and her husband. The ache to tell her almost rivals his will not to. Almost. “Oh.”

“Miss?”

Martha, already halfway out of the kitchen door, arches a brow in his direction. “You were right.” For a moment, her words throw him off. “I picked the red dress, in the end.”

Then she leaves, only the smell of her cyclamen perfume to prove her passage. Alfred remains still as she feels it fade, trying to put his thoughts in order.

The red dress. Pauline Trigere, one shoulder evening cocktail gown, tight with a siren tail and a slit from the left knee down. A rubies brooch to hold the tulle falling along one arm, to the waist. It had been the dress she was trying on when Alfred had walked into the tailor’s shop to pick her up. She’d twirled into it, happy as a little girl,  _ what do you say, Alfred? Too bold? You think Thomas would like it? _

He’d been taken by surprise, and therefore acted stupidly and recklessly.  _ Only a fool wouldn’t, Madam _ . 

A fool, he is not, but a bloody idiot, oh. The greatest of all, by a mile.

“ _ Are you fucking kidding me?! _ ”

He jerked when he realised that he was, indeed, still holding the receiver in his hand. Only for an instant he allowed himself to grimace, then he took all the mess of emotions in his chest and pushed them deep down into the box he’d long since created for the very purpose of keeping his mind sharp and free of distractions. Then, he put his ear back to the phone. “It is not what-”

“ _ Fucking hell, it isn’t! _ ” Jenny’s screeches are so loud, he finds himself frowning. “ _ Are you fucking the boss’ wife? Seriously?! Alfred, for fuck’s sake, we don’t want a repeat of Liverpool, do we? _ ”

“Liverpool was a different thing. I was young and she didn’t tell me she was married to a Lord.”

“ _ Christ, Alfred. What the fuck is going on with you?! _ ”

“Nothing.”

“ _ That was  _ not _ nothing. That was a red dress that I’ve never seen and still  _ know _ has to be some sort of provocative. Either you’re already fucking this woman or she wants you to. And neither scenario can end well when her husband has such a reach. _ ”

“You-” he forces himself not to grit his teeth, “-will not speak of her in such manners.”

“ _ In which manners ought I speak of her, then? _ ” Jenny speaks lowly, the anger a seething amber under the ashes of implacable self-control. “ _ Because either you’re inviting this or you aren’t, and I can’t say I much like the other option either. _ ”

“This isn’t-oh, bollocks.” 

He pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers to ease the incoming headache away. It’s coming, he can feel it, and he really doesn’t need that too. Another sigh, for good measure, before allowing the truth to take shape outside the barrier of his lips, in the open where he never wanted it to appear. Leave it to Jenny to force his face into the one thing he’s been staunchly refusing to look at. 

“It’s truly not what you think,” he finally allows. “She only has a brother with whom she holds the shallowest of bonds, and now she feels pity that I cut my family off to work for them. Thomas is just as expansive and caring. They’re Americans, it’s how they are and all that. It doesn’t have any deeper meaning.”

“ _... You sure? _ ”

“Absolutely.”

“ _ Uh-uh. _ ”

“Jenny.”

“ _ Fine! I’ll trust your judgement, despite all evidence to date proving that to be a stupid course of action. But be careful, you hear me? You get into enough shit without needing to look for more. _ ”

That, he sadly has to agree with. Just yesterday, he got into a fistfight with two paparazzi trying to sneak into the Manor grounds. It was easily and speedily taken care of, but an issue nonetheless which shook Martha and troubled Thomas. Next time, he thinks he’ll come up with an excuse and deal with the situation without informing them. Better for everyone.

“I am not a child anymore, Jenny,” he offers, trying for apologetic teasing. “I’m thirty-five.”

“ _ Ah! Thirty-five!, _ ” she sniffs. “ _ Practically an infant! _ ”

“Oh, screw you.”

“ _ Sorry, darling, I’m a bit too old for you _ .”

Alfred shakes his head. “Be here as soon as you can and deal with whatever spell you got involved with this time.” A deep breath. “And for the love of all which is holy, just try and act civilised, for once.”

“ _ Fuck yourself in the ass with a fucking- _ ” He hangs up.

Ghosts, uh? Magic and spirits and darkness. Just what he needed on top of all his daily duties, indeed. He pulled the watch from his breast pocket and quietly cussed at the time.

Well, the supernatural will have to wait until Jenny shows up, he decides. Until then, he has dozens of things still to do to ensure the party will be absolutely perfect, and no time to waste.

He puts the cup and kettle from Martha’s tea to soak in the sink, dries his hands and then hurries up to the main study to pick up the lady’s mask.


	4. Chapter III

**_San Francisco, June 17th, 1969_ **

This job is only a hobby, but it’s a hobby she  _ needs _ , or so they tell her at the AA meetings. Money’s not the issue; time off is. When she stops moving, stops acting, she starts to think and that’s when everything goes flushing down the toilet. 

Too many memories, and she’s only sixty-three. The leftover thirty-seven years to reach one-hundred seem like an endless path, uphill and in the jungle and under the pouring hail and surrounded by mosquitos and venomous snakes. Hell, she hates snakes.

So, a job. Something to keep busy, her sponsor told her. Keep the mind off the ugly things in her past.

She wonders if the man has any idea of how many times she’s been considering murder as a valid social option since working waitress at this godforsaken pub in the warehouse district. It can’t be that much healthier than before, can it?

People here wouldn’t know a good beer if she poured it in their shoes. That’s probably what pisses her off the most. Touches, she just swiftly deals with: a broken wrist here, a snapped elbow there, and The Counter has the best rep as a safe workplace among the waitresses of the whole city. Easy.

She just brought to a table a tray full of piss disguised as malt, not that any of the men have a single neuron sober enough to care, when the cook yells for her hoarsely from the kitchen.

_ Let it not be about extra shifts again _ , she groans mentally as she passes through the swinging doors. The smell of chili hits her hard enough to make her eyes water. “What is it?”

Vince doesn’t look up from cutting whatever thing he passes for meat this time around. Her guess would be rat, but she doesn’t really want to look into it any deeper. Or at all. At all would be wonderful, actually. “Call for you, phone on the back.”

The phone on the back is the one hanging on the outer wall which gives on the empty alley behind the pub, and that they use to contact their stockists whenever something’s wrong with their orders so the trucks don’t have time to unload and then complain they can’t bring the stuff back now. It’s not the phone they usually let the clients use, for obvious reasons.

She knows who’s calling the moment Vince points her to the door.

Her apron goes half flying on a cabinet and her feet stomp heavily at a march speed. She knows she can’t be seen, but it makes her feel better to approach the battle with the seemingly innocuous phone properly.

She lifts the receiver with snappish gestures. “Are you fucking serious?! I don’t even have a phone, now! How the fuck did you find me?”

“ _ I like to think that if you didn’t want to be found, you’d hide your trails better, _ ” Alfred retorts, and somehow, unsurprisingly, he sounds ever posher than the last time she heard from him. And he was wearing a tuxedo, back then. “ _ May I also offer my congratulations on the AA program? I’ve heard you achieved wonderful goals. _ ”

There’s loud noise in the background. Music and people’s voices. The Wayne’s are either hosting a concert in their undoubtedly-big-enough Manor or they’re hosting an orgy and they plan on covering up the noise with music. Either or. She’s not sure what role Alfred would have in both, but she’s sure she doesn’t want to know.

“I cleaned your shit-stained trousers when you were an army brat, don’t fucking talk to me like that.” Her fingers itch for a cigarette. Which are in her apron. Which she threw away in a fit.  _ Fuck _ , she hates when her dramatics come to bite her in the ass.

“ _ And I will forever be grateful for your endless support. _ ”

“And now you need it again.”

“ _ Perhaps. _ ”

“Where the fuck are you?” she snaps, when the screeching of some abused instrument make her nose itch. “What this fucking noise?”

Alfred clears his throat. Bad habit, betraying awkwardness. It’s cute, she used to think, that he managed to cover it up completely when he was with anyone else, but fell back on it whenever he was speaking with her. Now, she just goes straight on defense, when she hears it. “ _ You wouldn’t happen to have heard about a musical event in the rural countryside by the Ashokan Reservoir? _ ”

“The what?”

“ _ Nearby the Hudson river. Kigston Plaza? _ ”

“Uh uh.”

“ _ Poughkeepsie? _ ”

“You going to say anything that makes sense anytime soon, or...?”

“ _Well,_ _four hours North of New York, there happens to be a lovely small town named Bethel. The thing is-_ ”

It dawns on her like a bucket of snow and water. “Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.”

“ _ Language, please. _ ”

“You’re at fucking Woodstock, holy fucking shit.” It was on tv for the past two days. A music festival with roughly half a million spectators and all the big musicians the organization could get their hands on. Granted, half the people talking about it were preaching on about the hippies having sex, but damn.

Wait a minute.

“ _ Please, try and be respectful for once. _ ”

“Oh, trust me-,” she finds herself speaking in whispers and checking behind her back for eavesdroppers, for some reason, “-I’m biting my tongue really hard here. What the hell happened to ‘ _ it’s not what you think, Jenny’ _ ?”

Alfred sighs in answer, but there’s a weird tilt to his breath. An upward note, a dreamy shade that cannot be contained and ends up painting even his annoyance. “ _ I seem to have misread the situation, back then. _ ”

“Misread my fucking ass. You put a blindfold on your own face and decided to play Blind Man’s Buff in a glasshouse, you bloody idiot.” She’s counting the exit routes now, twisting the phone cord so hard in her hand she might snap it. 

America as a whole is probably a no-go if Wayne decides to get revenge on his traitorous wife and butler, but maybe Mexico is out of his reach? London might be too much of a risk since he knows Alfred still has people there, but the people in question are mostly ex spies and veterans so that could work as deterrent for the man. Was it work to go against the MI6 for a love affair, after all? 

By the way. “And what the fuck are you doing in fucking Woodstock?”

“ _ I am spending some undercover time with both the loves of my life, as it happens. _ ”

A balloon popping would have given her less of a whiplash, and made her jump less. She takes the words apart with prying fingers, searching for another person in her mind that could fit the leftover spot but coming up, no matter that path she takes, the twists she gives, always with the very same name. “Oh.”

“ _ As I was saying-, _ ” Alfred clears his voice again, “ _ -I originally misread the situation. _ ”

Call it a misreading. “Just Americans, uh?”

“ _ I was informed that the expansive and caring treatment I received was indeed not just the product of a growing friendship. That as well, of course, but alas. _ ”

“Flirting. They were flirting with you. The both of them.” It doesn’t sound any less crazy the more she thinks it. “The bloody Waynes were flirting with you. And now the three of you are in Woodstock. Together.”

“ _ I know you’re not so unaware of the practice of polyamory so could we maybe move past your shock and get to the point where I’m calling you from a farm because I believe I found some sort of portal in a clearance in the woods, half a mile from the festival? _ ”

“...actually, I would have preferred to remain on the part where you’re hooking up with not one but two billionaires, but I guess you wouldn’t be amiable to that, uh?”

“ _ Firmly not. _ ”

“Right. Portal. Clearance. The woods. What were you doing in the woods half a mile away from your festival?”

“ _ Jenny. _ ”

“Fine! I’m guessing you aren’t the only people who thought of finding themselves a little love spot a bit secluded from the crowd, so you want me to get there quick, am I wrong?”

He doesn’t rise to the bait, sadly. “ _ I think that would be best, yes. _ ”

“I’ll be there in an hour. Just the time to resign from this shit-ass job and I’ll be there.”

“ _ I’m sure we can find you- _ ”

“Don’t bother. I’ve dealt with the general public enough to last me for another century. I’m good.”

“ _ I did think that it was not the line of profession that would suit you better. _ ”

“We can’t all find the job of our dreams playing middle spoon for the rich and beautiful.”

“ _ Are you going to be like that when you get here too? _ ”

“Probably.”

“ _ Wrong answer. _ ”

“I’ll behave, mom.”

There was a breath that sounded far too relieved. She was almost offended. “ _ Thank you. _ ”

“See you in an hour.” She hangs up, but for some reason the air keeps buzzing with the energy of her new revelation.

Fucking Alfred. Bloody Alfred. She can’t believe the galls of this man, truly.

She’s aware that he’s not an idiotic child in a too big uniform anymore and that he must know the risks, but the instict to grab him by the arms, remind him of all he has to lose from this is still there, making her skin itchy and strained. She won’t tell him, because he hasn’t sounded so happy in many decades, but she’ll worry, because it’s kind of what she does when Alfred is involved.

She walks in with her mind on the battle already, stops barely to pick her cigarettes from her apron but resists the urge to lit one up. Later, she tells herself.

Her resignation is just a middle finger to the crowd yelling at her back as she gets out.


	5. Chapter IV

**_Gotham, June 26th, 1978_ **

He should turn the TV off. It is the only sensible thing to do, after all. They couldn’t say anything he hasn’t heard already, and the pictures they pass are nothing compared to the painting branded forever just behind his eyelids. The words they are speaking are only apparently kind, and vicious underneath the surface, and what if Bruce wakes up- 

No,  _ when _ , when Bruce wakes up, because of course he will, the poor thing hasn’t gotten a peaceful hour of sleep since he crashed hard after the-

Lord. Alfred is so goddamn tired himself.

He switches channel and falls on an expert detailing the rate of crime in Gotham since its very funding. Change again, and Fox News is airing a tasteless pathetic pouf piece detailing all  _ the highs and lows _ of Gotham’s most prominent family. Change again, this time with harsher pressure on the button, and here’s a no-name local conspiracy channel which had leasts has the guts to say it,  _ what of their money? _ , it’s not like it isn’t what everyone in this bloody city has been thinking about since the news broke out.

Phillip Kane called two hours ago. He’s driving over, he said. For the child.

_ Do you even remember his middle name? _ , Alfred wanted to ask him.  _ His birthday, which you never attended once? Which grade he’s in, which subjects he’s good at, the names of his friends? _

Another channel, another tale. What were they doing in such a place at such a time? Good riddance, a woman has the galls to say. Good riddance, goddamn depraved, all the more luck for the kid that he doesn’t have to live with such people anymore.

He takes note of the name, to release the hounds of the law on her when he’ll find in himself the strength to get up from this chair. As of now, pretending for Bruce’s sake is the only thing for which he seems able to muster his energies.

_ Bruce _ is also the reason that possessed him to bring the phone to the living room, but he has yet to pitch in a number. He doesn’t know it, he’s aware, so he’s not sure of the use he could make of such a device, but he couldn’t help himself.

The thought barely occurs in his mind and the bloody thing is already ringing.

The main landline, the number listed on the phone book, has long since been ripped from the wall. Paparazzi, Alfred found, could be the worst filth of Earth.

He picks this call up, because the number only exists under his name and is not in the public knowledge. “You saw the news?” he asks, though it’s a dumb question. 

Everyone and their mothers saw the news.

“ _ I did. _ ” Jenny sounds sober and respectful, for once, but her voice catches and scratches to betray her neverending vice of smoking. Alfred would tell her it will be her death, but he’s not much for gallows humor lately. “ _ How are you holding up? _ ”

_ I’m not. _ “The funeral is tomorrow morning,” he deflects. It’s blatant, and he doesn’t care.

“ _ So late? _ ”

“They needed-”  _ the bodies, the corpses, the evidence. _ “Autopsies.”

“ _ Oh. Alfred, I’m sorry. _ ”

“You didn’t even like them.” It’s rude, he’s aware, but he’s too tired of people’s conniving condolences to tolerate them from the only family he feels he has left.

“ _It doesn’t matter_ ,” she counters. Her voice, he notices, is firm but remains in a register of low softness. He recognizes it from the one time she broke him out of captivity, the way she’d spoken to him back then as if he were a frightened small pet. It crushes his pride a bit more, to realise that’s oddly fitting. “ _You loved them._ ”

“Do not say that,” he hisses. His hand grabs the chair armrest and his shoulders stiffen, but he doesn’t take it back.

Of course he loved them. Every second since that bloody call, he’s spent wishing he’d been there to take the bullets on himself, but all that love mattered less than a single word from a single man, now. 

“ _ Okay, _ ” Jenny concedes. Her conciliatory attitude is almost ridiculously at odds with the whole rest of her. “ _ What do you need, Alfred. I’m here. _ ”

This, he can do. For Bruce. “Are you in Gotham?”

“ _ I came as soon as I heard. _ ”

He wouldn’t have doubted it, normally. Jenny had never failed once to show up when he needed her. Recently, though, all his firm points had fallen from underneath his feet, and he only realises he’s been holding his breath when he lets it out in a long exhale. “I will need you at the function tomorrow.”

He can picture her frowning just from the pause before her reply. “ _ Why? _ ”

Because a toga and a law degree hold the entirety of Alfred’s soul in the palm of a hand, right now. “Pick up today’s edition of any newspaper.”

“ _ I’m not asking a rubbish rag, I’m asking  _ you _. Alfred. I know that voice. I know you’re planning something. Now I’ll ask you again. Why? _ ”

She knows, he realises. She just wants him to say it. “There will be a custody battle.” He hates that his voice cracks, as he says it. “For Bruce.”

“ _ I thought- The news said there was a will. _ ”

“Yes, and it nominates me Bruce’s guardian in case of their death. But I am not so stupid as to believe it will not be contested.” It’s still clear as a day in his mind, the face on the other presents’ faces when the notary read the words out loud. “Thomas’ sister is not a real threat, she has too many precedents of unstable behavior and abuse of substances, but she’s not the only one. Martha’s brother will arrive today, no doubt to put his hat in the ring, and he has pull and powerful friends in the military.”

“ _ You sound like you’ll be going at this like a war, _ ” Jenny says. 

Her naivety makes him scoff. “We’re talking about the heir of a billionaire fortune, a war is  _ exactly _ what this is.” The TV is running the pictures of the police secluding the alley. He turns it off brusquely. “I cannot afford to have my flank wide open when the first shots ring out, and my-” he won’t  _ choke _ on this, “-my loneliness is the first target they’ll aim at.”

The meaning of his words reaches the target this time, and hits to draw out surprised inhale. “ _ You want me to be your beard. You want me to pretend to be your lover or wife or whatever. Alfred, I still look twenty-seven and you’re fifty. I don’t think this is going to help your case that much. _ ”

She’s colder now, but Alfred can’t tell whether it’s to him or to the people he’s been mentioning. Either is viable, considering what he’s asking of her. “You would be surprised. Would you do that for me?”

A brief hesitancy, then a non-sequitur. “ _ The child was born in 1970. _ ”

“Jenny,” he says, but his voice is begging against his will, too frail for a demand and too low for authority.

“ _ February 19th. _ ” Indeed, she ignores him and soldiers on. “ _ I’m not stupid, Alfred, and I know neither are you. That’s eight months past Woodstock, and Woodstock wasn’t the first time. _ ”

“Stop it.”

“ _ I can take care of the results. Make sure they say he’s yours even if it turns out he isn’t. _ ”

“No.”

“ _ Why not, Alfred?! Why is it better to pretend you’ve got a secret wife half your age that you kept hidden all this time than to tell them what is fundamentally the truth, regardless of that bloody test. That kid is- _ ”

“That kid doesn’t deserve this too!” The echoes of his voice overwhelms him. He’s not sure what shocks him the most into silence, if the fact that he’s been yelling and he can’t remember the last time he did it or the fact that the house is now so empty there’s no one to hear it but himself. “That kid… Jenny, he’s been through hell. I can’t do this to him too. I can’t.”

“ _ Alfred... _ ”

The air is suddenly too heavy for him to even sit. It crushes him curled on his knees, keeps him bowed as if in prayer or prone as if a supplicant. 

“The rumors have been going on for, oh,” he runs a hand down his face, too tired to care that he finds it wet. “I don’t know. Years, now. About me and Thomas, even, but about me and Martha the most. An homosexual liaison is not that grave a deal, it ends and leaves no trace aside from  _ he said she said _ .”

Thomas used to laugh about it all, roll his eyes in the vanity mirror as he fixed his necktie and call it  _ background noise _ . His knots were always so horribly done, Alfred had to adjust them everytime, and that’s when another kiss would be stolen past all his defenses.  _ You worry too much _ , the usual declaration.  _ Let them talk. They like my money too much to do anything about it, anyway. _

“ _ A child is a bit more tangible than word of mouth, _ ” Jenny agrees.

“We could have watered the rumors, before. We did, as a matter of fact. They were just allusions up there with conspiracy theories. But Bruce has grown up with that kind of talk going on behind his back. I couldn’t-” The thought of the, _the the the_ _his_ _the,_ child in tears after galas, dirty in mud after school, frowning and angry and sad, burns the remnants of his pride. “He lost his parents both that night. I couldn’t possibly destroy the memories he has of them as well.”

“ _ He’s grown up with the three of you, like a family. He’ll understand, if you explain- _ ”

“What I can tell him behind closed doors is not what he’ll have to live with out in the world for the rest of his life,” he cuts her off. “Even if he understood. Even if he believed me and didn’t hate me for it. It’s already going to be hard. I refuse to make it even worse.”

“ _ But- _ ”

“That’s my final word on the matter, Jenny.” From where he draws strength, he’s not sure. Maybe just the fear of Bruce in a world that  _ knows _ , or thinks it does. “Will you help me or not?”

Silence. 

He closes his eyes. “I see.”

“ _ Alfred, listen to me. _ ”

“I don’t think there’s any reason to.”

“ _ I know you won’t believe me, but I cannot help you. _ ”

“You used to.”

“ _ It’s different. That was… before. _ ”

“Before what?” But it strucks him the moment he thinks of it. Before, it was just him, or just him and Martha and Thomas. The last time Jenny showed up to help was before Bruce’s birth.

She speaks, as if aware of his thoughts,  _ “That kid will change the world, Alfred. It’s too bloody important that I do not get too close, or- _ ”

“On the contrary,-” his voice is a distant cold, a song scratching from an old gramophone, “-I do believe you.”

“ _ Alfred? _ ”

“That Bruce will change the world. I do believe it.” Everything that kid poses his eyes on, every question he makes, every silence he takes up to think Lord knows what; they’re all signs that Alfred had picked up every day for years now. Every breath that kid takes shapes the world. “There’s just one thing we don’t seem to share.”

“ _ What- _ ”

The picture in his head clogs his chest with wet slime. “I would rather the world implode than to leave it weighing on his back.”

He doesn’t hang up, but he throws the phone to the wall. The thing bangs on impact and then falls quietly on the floor.

Alfred stares at it and takes stock of himself, finding his breath labored and his legs straight to keep him standing. Then, slowly, he uncoils himself into a step, and another, until he can pick the device up again.

It’s not broken, luckily. The wheel of the numbers is a bit stiff when it reaches three, but he manages to input another number before the blasted thing rings again.

If Jenny tries to call, that is.

Three rings. “ _ Alfred. Took you long enough. _ ”

He gulps and forces himself past his suddenly dried throat. “Leslie. We need to talk.”


	6. Chapter V

**_Gotham, December 31st, 1999_ **

The phone croones relentlessly in his ear, for the third time in barely eighteen minutes, and by now even the connecting tune sounds bored of his attempts. Still, Alfred lets it ring through until the beeping shifts into the signal of unanswered call before giving up and hanging the received back in its station on the wall.

Any other person, he would find an explaination for the lack of response. Well, he also wouldn’t call three times in such a short span of time, had it been any other person. His manners have preserved intact with the years, despite abysmally failing to pass on to the younger generations. Julia included and underlined, of course.

With Jenny, everything is always a bit different. 

Her number stares at him from his ragged address book. The calligraphy of all sharp angles and thick lines, a confident trait with speed on its side, has not faded out with the years and he never saw a reason to copy the digits into a more modern device. He had been informed when he’d received it that putting those numbers in the invisible realm of the new technology was comparable to turning up a certain lamp on the rooftop of the GCPD building, but no occasion ever felt worthy of such a summon.

Even tonight, it seems like an intrusion. There isn’t an emergency, after all.

The timer by the oven rings, and Alfred makes sure to put the little book safely on a side of the counter before returning his full attention to the hot chocolate on the stove. He already turned the fire off thirty seconds ago, but experience taught him to leave drinks and food to cool down to a manageable level before bringing them to the den.

It appears that the room has the unique power to make  _ too hot to consume _ and  _ carefulness  _ concepts of unreachable grasp.

He twirls the wooden spoon in the pot carefully, finding the drink not too thick nor too watery finally. The smell of warm milk tickles his memory with both happy and bitter moments, and he finds himself caressing gently the faces of old friends, most of which long since gone.

Spanish. Bazza. Daveboy. 

Thomas and Martha.

Jenny. 

The phone remains ominously quiet, which he realises sounds like a dumb thought even to his own ears.

Of course, nothing is inherently ominuous in a quiet phone. There could be many explainations for the unanswered calls. He made them all in such short time that Jenny might have simply not being home for any of them. Equally likely, she might have moved and the number could no longer belong to her, but to someone else who was not picking up insistent calls from an unknown number. After all, she’d given it to him shortly before Bruce’s birth, and by the Lord how long ago that was. Long enough to feel like a completely different life, at times.

He’d gotten drunk, that night. He and Thomas together, after Martha had fallen asleep - quite literally within one second of the nurse taking the boy from her - and the obstetrician had kicked them out of the room to let her rest. They’d gone to the closest place, Thomas had yelled he was paying for everyone in the bar and from then things got just the tiniest bit foggy.

He remembers the bathroom stall, though, and Thomas’ laughter when he’d arched his nose at the state of the sink.

Alfred catches himself smiling. His hands are moving on their own, picking the Special Occasion mugs from the cabinet, but his mind is playing in the field of ancient tenderness and jumps all over between the details, Thomas’ smile and Martha’s eyes and his hands and her neck and his shoulders and her legs. 

For a very long time, he hasn’t been able to think of them without hurt ripping him apart, clean in two. The knowledge of all the attacks he fended off of them used to sit like a boulder on his shoulders, forever a reminder of the one time -  _ one time _ \- he let them talk him into visiting London again for his sister’s funeral. The one time his stubborness to keep his old family separated from the new one made him unwilling to let the three of them come along with him.

If he’d been there. If they had been with him. So many  _ ifs _ all over his soul.

Bruce always was a sponge of a kid, absorbing informations and habits and attitudes from his surroundings the way a sunflower drinks up the light. Alfred is only now old and aware enough to admit that it was probably his guilt and how he dealt with it that shaped his son in the brooding paranoid man he is now.

_ Regret _ , Martha used to say,  _ is for the lazy, and redemption is always one step out of reach.  _

One last call, perhaps? Twenty full minutes passed from the first call, maybe this time-

Alfred shakes his head at the juvenile thought. Jenny  _ did _ answer immediately the last time, but he had treated her horribly in his grief. Twenty minutes, thirty, an hour or a day; Jenny isn’t going to answer if she doesn’t want to, and she is going to find him the moment she decides it is a good time for it, even if she has to make the toaster into a working communicator.

He pours the chocolate into three mugs, weights being responsible against celebrating the night and finally decides that one cheat won’t be too bad as long as a firm hand is applied to tooth brushing. From the lower cupboard - because he’s long since learnt that height alone is not deterrent enough - by the frigde, within the big pot for the chili, he pulls a mag of mini marshmallows and hurriedly damps a handful into two of the mugs. He makes quick work of hiding the treat again, but also takes the time to ensure that nothing can be spotted at first glance.

In the third mug, he pours a generous serving of rhum instead. It  _ is _ a special occasion for him as well, after all.

He smiles at the sight of the cheap mugs on the silver tray. They’ve been a gift for Bruce’s latest birthday and come with an elaborate smell of petroleum and death. The bright blue of Superman’s costume with the familiar crest, a deep borgundy with Wonder Woman’s symbol and, strictly forbidden from Bruce’s use, a deep grey one with the black bat on it. 

They are the only mostruosity from that hellhole Target Alfred is going to allow in his kitchen, he’s been very clear on the matter.

He walks briskly to the den, mindful of the drinks not cooling to much, and he finds himself welcomed by loud music from the TV and louder voices from much closer. 

Immediately after a gala, there’s an inch of time Alfred is especially fond of. With the guests gone, and the catering gone, and the air finally blessedly silent, the Manor seems barely big enough to contain the quiet that they need to recover from the socialization.

Bruce especially appreciates the end of the spectacle, and he never fails to retire to the den and flop unceremoniously on the armchair in front of the TV. “Never again,” he swears every time, just about as honest as a Don Giovanni professing his love.

Lately, it is no longer Alfred’s duty to point out his flair for dramatics.

“You always say that, B!” Steps too hurried, deserving of a chastise every other day, and then quiet and immediately after a  _ hoof _ . “If you don’t like them, then why do you keep organizing more?”

“Appearances.”

“I thought you said not to care about what people think.”

_ Go on,  _ he thinks fondly.  _ Hold him accountable. Give him no rest. _

He knocks on the door. “I better not find anything broken when I get in.”

He allows a full minute for balance to be restored, and good thing that he does if the sudden quiet and then creaks of moved furniture are any hint to go by. When he pushes the door opened, the only noticeable thing is the absence of the vase from the coffee table in front of the TV.

He arches a brow, but Bruce, the little scoundrel, has the galls to meet it with his Brucie smile. As if everything he knows about acting and deflection he didn’t learn from Alfred himself. “Hot chocolate!” he exclaims, Judas. “You always have the greatest ideas, dear friend.”

“Oh, now I am a  _ dear friend _ ,” Alfred returns, stoic. “Yet until barely a few hours ago I was  _ not the boss of yours _ . I see how it is.”

Bruce has at least the decency to grimace, though he doesn’t straighten up his posture from his slouch on the couch. “This night is usually more agitated. And with the turn-”

“A data I was not aware of, since I have only lived in Gotham for a mere five decades.” Another grimace. From the balled up quilt besides Bruce comes a stifled giggle. “Now, I seem to have miscounted the number of guests. How awfully distracted of me. What shall we do with this leftover mug?” He pours himself in a sigh that could make all the soap-operas heroines turn green in envy. “There’s no helping it. I must throw it away.”

“No!” 

With natural flair and a grand gesture, Dick emerges from the quilt throwing it away with a grand swipe of his arm. Bruce ends up taking most of it to the face, and splutters the thread of wools that catch in his mouth.

Even so, the smile on his lips is indestructible, and Alfred finds his mouth picking up as well. “Ah, Master Dick. An incredible feat of camuflage.”

Dick rolls his eyes at him, the juvenile game clearly falling a bit too small on his nine years, but doesn’t correct him on his overacting. With all he’s seen and all that happened to him and had forced him to grow up too fast, Alfred suspects that on quiet evenings like this the child finds a thrilling joy in pretending to still be a kid for a while longer.

Far be it from anyone in the house to get in the way of such a wish.

He’s barely put the tray down and the child already has stolen his mug. Alfred tries for a reproaching glare, without putting too much effort into it.

Much more effort he puts, instead, in the swat that he lands on Bruce’s hand when he tries to pick the spiked mug. The man looks baffled at first, then unimpressed. “Alfred, I am  _ thirty _ .”

“A mere third of my age, Master Bruce. Here-,” he puts the Superman mug in his hand instead, “-have some marshmallows.”

“You’re  _ not _ ninety.”

“Could have fooled me! Must be the fact that every night the Bat patrols the street I feel myself age five years on the spot.” Only some mumbled grumbling answers his declaration. Satisfied, he takes his own Wonder Woman mug and sits on the spare armchair. “How much longer?”

“Last thirty seconds,” Dick cheers. Not even with the full mug in his hands the child manages to sit still and proper; instead, he moved to his knees and is savagely shaking Bruce’s shoulders. “Get ready, get ready!”

“What does  _ ready _ consist of?” Bruce asks. Dick doesn’t not bother replying to him, and instead sets to climb his shoulders one-handed.

Alfred spares one despairing look to the velvet of the sofa, already picturing in his mind the hell it will be to get hot chocolate out of it.

The TV announcer yells the final countdown.  _ Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one- _

“HAPPY NEW YEAR!” Dick shrieks.

Alfred laughs at Bruce’s wince as the scream erupts right by his ear. More quietly, he answers, “Happy New Years, my boys.”

The drops of chocolate on the velvet can be a problem for tomorrow.


	7. Epilogue

**_Opal City, April 26th, 2012_ **

The voice cracks and breaks so often she has to listen to the message twice before she can catch all the words.

The beginning of the message is actually pretty clear sounding, though the meaning is still very dark:  _ Oh, bloody hell. What am I doing? I don’t even know if this number still works. _ Most of the difficulty comes on further ahead, when the man starts crying.

_ My boy _ , she got immediately because it was repeated more than once.  _ Lost _ too, and  _ cannot _ though the man speaking rarely ever said what it was that he couldn’t. On the second play she catches more of it.  _ Funeral, cruel, why. _ So many times he repeats the question,  _ why _ .

She thinks a boy died. It’s not much the words or the crying that give it away, but a tug of uneasiness in her chest. The feeling is unknown and familiar at the same time, as it often happens with her powers. Having several past lives all to a degree coexisting in a corner of your current soul tended to muddle things up a bit, when it came to feelings and sensations.

The air is still slightly chill in the evenings, even if April is almost over. She huddles deeper in her leather jacket and plays the record from her voice mail again.

It’s not even  _ her _ voice mail, technically. The message had been sent to an whole different number, she realised when she read the text that signalled it, but this wasn’t the weirdest thing to ever happen to her. Technology had a way to get her what needed to come to her attention, every so often.

“ _ Oh, bloody hell. What am I doing? I don’t even know if this number still works. _ ” The man repeats. “ _ I haven’t heard from you in so long, and I don’t- I don’t know if I even want to talk to you. He’s dead. Oh Lord, he’s dead. _ ” Rustling, white noise. Either the man’s blowing his nose or he tilted his head and is still talking, but his mouth is so far from the receiver the words don’t come over. There, at roughly half time, another full sentence. “ _ I thought I hated you when they died, but that was- that was nothing- nothing compared to- He’s gone. I can’t- _ ” Again with the can’t. So many more instances of it.

Everything is even more confused from then on. Like a dam cracking.

She wonders what kind of man has no one to mourn the death of a boy with, nothing but an old voicemail to vent at. The picture in his head, an umprompted painting of a richely furnished kitchen, is of an old man curled by years and despair over a chair. Few hair, few wrinkles, few skin spots on his hands. Frail like paper at sight.

Her heart, for some reason, aches unbearably the more she listens to his voice.

When the message finishes, she lets the screen go dark and tilts her head to the sky instead. 

Orange, clouds, the trail of an airplane. It’s quite beautiful, all considered, but she’s too acutely aware that she’s standing on the balcony of her parents’ flat.

This man lost a boy. She cannot help but think of them losing her. The world would burn in under ten seconds, if it ever happened.

Again, her stomach twists painfully. Not just the voicemail then. What else?

She closes her eyes and lets her senses dampen. Like falling in a wall, she loses touch with her own skin and goes down, lower and lower, deeper in the darkness in her chest.

Something is not right, so that’s what the feeling was. Something broke that shouldn’t have. Something went horribly wrong in a way the universe never planned for, nor was willing to accept.

The ley lines of the planet are the veins of her body and she runs along them, searching, looking, not here, further, west?, south, almost,  _ here _ .

_ Oh _ , she thinks. It must be the dead boy of the voicemail. 

Well, fuck. He should most definitely  _ not _ be dead. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

She’s slammed back into her body to find her lips voicing out her cusses. Begrudgingly, she closes them. 

The sun set, she must have been out here longer than planned, and her skin is cold and clammy. There is no doubt that she should be going in, but instead her hand slips into her pocket and pulls out the cigarettes pack. It’s not easy to light one up with her fingers so stiffed frozen, but eventually she makes it and the nicotine warms her up from the inside enough that her thoats begin circulating again.

Okay, so. It is a mess. A shitfuck of a mess, actually, but that’s what the universe created her for, right? Not like she applied for the job, but still.

She blows the smoke out, and almost misses the hiss of the glass door sliding open behind her.

“You coming in anytime soon?” Her dad’s voice warms her up some more, or maybe it’s the furnace heat coming from his body. Eh, either way, it loosens up her shoulders a bit. “Dinner’s ready.”

She knows he hates her smoking habit, she can see the objection on his lips when she turns toward him, but whatever else is on her face stops him from voicing it out loud. His blue eyes squinted slightly and he frowned. “Jenny?”

She replays the message on the phone.

“I think-” she says when it’s over, her voice turning into white puffs of condensations almost as if her lips are turning them into something physical and concrete, “-the universe wants me to fix this.”

Apollo blinks once, then closes his eyes and sighs.


End file.
